¶Fix list for Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1
Glenn Maynard writes:
I sure wish I could find a good list of what's actually changed. The "new in SP1" list is empty.
Ah, yes. Microsoft made it really hard to tell what actually got fixed in Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1. There are actually some fix lists out, though (and I do mean lists).
The "what's new in SP1" selection referred to by the SP1 release notes is indeed empty -- sloppy. One of the commenters on the VC++ blog found a list of hotfixes that made it into the service pack, though:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/918526
This is not a comprehensive list of fixes, as it only lists hotfixes; other bugs that were submitted on Connect have also been fixed. Some, but not all, of the fixes that were tentatively listed for VC++ SP1 (http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2006/06/22/643325.aspx) made it into the build. For instance, a fix for a for scoping bug that I submitted got backed out -- I'm pretty sure that was in the beta build -- but an obscure alloca() bug was fixed.
If you dig further into the help, you can find a new SP1 section added to the "What's New in Visual C++ Compiler, Language, and Tools" section, listing new features added to the service pack (naughty, naughty).
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f0tby9k9(VS.80).aspx
The new features are minor. The SP1 page says that it adds "new processor support (e.g. Core Duo) for code generation," but don't get too excited. All of the new VC++ features pertain only to kernel mode -- specifically, intrinsics were added for the new hardware virtualization instructions, and for declaring whether a 32-bit pointer is signed or unsigned. Okay, you could use __ud2() and __nop() in user space, but they're not terribly useful.
Update:
Kevin Frei on the VC++ team posted a little note on his blog about compiler level fixes in SP1:
http://blogs.msdn.com/freik/archive/2006/12/19/new-job-sp1.aspx
It looks like SP1 is worthwhile if you do AMD64 or use profile guided optimization (PGO).